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First Time – STUCK
Well,
I guess if you’re out there enough, it’s bound to happen to you. Today, it happened to me 🙁
To make a long-story short, which actually started last week, today while trying to pull into our site at Mike Roess State Park in Florida, we (I) got stuck in soft sand. In order to back into my site, I pulled into the site across from my site, which was not occupied. Of course, I checked my site out before pulling in, but I didn’t walk the site across from me. Wish I had.
Anyway, I hit some soft sand and next thing I know, my passenger drive tires were buried in around six inches of sand. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but enough where the passenger drive tires simply were spinning and my driver drive tires just sat there.
I learned, and confirmed thru Prevost, that the transmission/differential design from Prevost when there are different pressures on the drive tires, that the drive tires engages with the least amount of pressure engages, while the other drive tires disengages. While going down the road, both are engaged, but for some reason, when I needed both, one of them disengaged.
Anyway, after a call to the Park Ranger and figuring that no 2×6 was going to get me out, I called Coach-Net, who got me the “right” wrecker. Fortuantely, I had seen the demo at the Maintenance Seminar on towing, demonstrating the right type of wrecker that should be used on a Prevost. However, I didn’t need to be towed, but needed a winch to pull me from the back of the bus to a solid surface.
So, with the right equipment, the tow truck driver used his handy (massive) winch to get me out … which took less than 30-seconds, with help from me. I have a couple pics, but didn’t any pics of the winch since I was in the bus, assisting the winch with putting it in “R” while the tow truck driver slowly tightened the winch, allowing me to creep out of the sand-hole I created.
While no one wants to be stranded or call a tow truck, we were actually in an ideal spot for this to happen, as we were stuck in the site across from ours, and no one was coming in today.
Morale of the story, check out any site or area you’re taking/moving/turning into as having hard ground/surface to confirm your 54,000 lbs. bus won’t sink!
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15 Replies
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Dont feel bad I remember a Rally that almost every coach was pulled into and then at the end pulled out of the Rally site…someone thought that Florida sand pasture would work for a Rally…it didnt work so well……
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Tim, if you tried lifting the tag, did it make any difference?
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Glad that it came out easy. I do not know if this would work with your coach and in sand that deep but an old pulp wood truck driver helped me out of a bind one time.
I had backed into a church yard, against my better judgement but at the insistence of the Pastor. Famous last words, “It’s dry and solid as the parking lot.” I backed 50′ feet into the yard leaving 4-6″ ruts all the way. When I got out of the bus, he was white and I was sick.
I got sicker when it rained all week. I fully expected to be winched out.
The old truck driver told me this. “Hold your brakes with one foot and then the gas pedal with the other. Make the brakes almost hold you back and it may prevent one side from losing traction and the other side stopping.”
I did as he said and pulled out without spinning one time. I have been back to that church several times and I always park on the parking lot where ever I fancy!
That was in early days of bus ownership. I am less pliable now.
Davy
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I lifted the tag and it made no difference.
Davy,
Interesting approach and if there is a next time (hopefully not) I’ll try your technique. But with the one drive tire disengaged, I’m not sure how this method would work.
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Sorry to hear your story but I never thought I’d admit this, so don’t tell anybody. Especially Tom. How about getting stuck twice in the same day? Cool, eh?
Years ago we were in Florida in November with a Country Coach Magna and got a call from Canada. My dad had passed away. So we high-tailed it to a small town in Ontario to park at my sister’s farm. “No problem, she said. You can park beside the house. It’s solid ground”. Well we did and it wasn’t. In the morning the rear end had sunk in soggy, semi-frozen Canadian crud.
“CoachNet, can you get us unstuck?”.
“Be there soon. Don’t go anywhere”, they said. A wrecker the size of Saskatchewan shows up, hooks up the winch, stretched the cable at least from here to you and pulled us out.
Off we go in a blizzard this time to dad’s town. We arrive at the only RV park that’s open, check with the office to insure the ground under the snow is solid.”Yup. It’s solid asphalt. I walked over, stomped around in 2 feet of snow, checking things out of course, then backed her in. Pitch black outside, howling wind and snowing sideways.
You guessed it. We go slowly backwards then even more slowly downwards.Then …. tilt. “Feels familiar dear. Am I dreaming? Didn’t we just do this this morning”?
“CoachNet? It’s me again.
“Be there soon. We kept your account open”, they said.
A massive machine arrives and I greet the driver with, “Now we gotta remove the front of the coach to get at the tow hooks … that is if we can find the front of the coach in this blizzard”, I said with a smile frozen on my face. We removed a bunch of stuff together. I had nothing else to do that night anyway.
Never say never. Sometime later, having run the winch cable through the next county and around four trees, we’re parked outside the park office on solid ground. Mary has recovered from her fetal position by now and I have presented the office with the bill. “Don’t worry. We’ll pay the tow bill. You’re on solid ground on this one this time”.
Almost forgot. Tom. I carry two pairs on Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville boat shoes just in case …. ah never mind.
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Just to clarify the differential operation, an open differential always splits torque evenly to both sides. It can’t send more torque to one pair of drive tires than the other.
When one pair of tires looses traction, there is little resistance to react the torque and the result is that you can’t generate much torque at either side. Imagine pushing on a tree with 50 pounds of force. Now imagine pushing on a tulip. You’ll never be able to apply 50 pounds to the tulip because it pushes over before you reach that force. The same principle applies to a tire with no traction. You can’t apply 1000 lb-ft of torque to the tire in the sand because it only takes 100 lb-ft to spin. (I’m making up these numbers here.) So because you can only put 100 lb-ft to the spinning tire, you can also only send 100 lb-ft to the tire with traction. Your differential always splits torque evenly, so it can’t send more torque to the tire with traction than can be taken by the slipping tire. That reduced torque to the drive tire that has traction isn’t enough to get you moving. So in reality, you are always powering both sides. It’s just that the same torque makes one tire spin and not the other.
Some vehicles have limited slip or locking differentials, which does allow more torque to be sent to the tire with traction.
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It would have been much easier if he could have winched me from the front since the hooks are located up there.
But we located a good enough place in the rear that we could hook up to the frame.
Almost looked at the trailer hitch, until I saw that it had a 10,000 lbs rating/1,000 lbs tongue rating, and I wasn’t sure, even with my assistance in putting it in “R”, if we would have exceeded the 10,000 lbs/1,000 tongue. I would have hated to lose my entire trailer …
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Nice explanation BDuplan. That phenomenon makes sense now. Thanks
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Hey Tim,
Sorry to hear about the needed tow. Did Cindy try and push to help? Ha ha! (you buy her a nice big present anyway).
I think we all have the fear that we might get stuck.
(short story)… When we had our Monaco Dynasty (weighing 40K), we were in Tea, SD, at a RV Park. It had rained the day before and the ground was wet and soggy.
We pulled in to our site, got set up, etc. In the morning, I noticed the steps were very close to the ground. We had sunk about four inches overnight.
The site was angled upwards so I had to overcome that force to move forward to pull out. I didn’t want to unhook the tow vehicle. I started the coach and started to move forward, I got about 3 ft. and the drive wheels started spinning. I tried that several times.
I came up with the bright idea of having ‘C’ get in the Honda and hit the gas when I hit the gas on the coach. Well, it was just enough momentum to get us rolling. So, a little 3,400 lb. AWD Honda CR-V saved our day. I could have unhooked the car and backed out but this worked perfectly.
Safe travels!
Mark -
Interesting stuff guys, I think we’ve all seen wrecks and situations when we had to wonder how the heck they got out of there. Knowing this happens to seasoned veterans like yourself tells me to pay that much more attention and I thank you for that.
Doug, You’re quite the storyteller, both entertaining and amusing and that always makes for a good read. Id love to hear Mary’s side of the “fetal position” however? I have a feeling her recollection may be a little different of, shall we say, “her position”!
Just for a little context, I met Doug and Mary at ETLC and we’re nice enough to invite me to lunch with them. Very nice folks!
BTW Doug, Tom was still wearing those Margaritaville boat shoe at the Maintenance Seminar in October. Yes, he sat alone a lot!
Harry
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What a great explanation of the split differential…
Pres
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Yes, great explanation of the split differential.
When I’m back on the farm driving a Semi in the crop fields, there are times your drive tires start spinning. However, unlike my bus, I can “lock” the differential to engage the second set of drive tires and, so far, I haven’t gotten myself stuck in the field …yet 🙂
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I always enjoy reading and learning from the wealth of knowledge on this forum. I rarely have much to offer as so many of you have years of experience. As I read this post, I think I have something that none of you have had happen so I will share it. I always get an aerial view of anyplace we are headed. On this particular day we were headed to our concert at a county fair in Indiana and it didn’t look like the path to the stage was paved all the way. Knowing it had rained earlier in the week, I checked with the lions club member at the gate who said it wasn’t a problem. Wrong! I turned the last corner and the bus just sank. When I walked to the lions club member and he asked what I needed, I told him the largest four wheel drive tractor they had. None were available so they spent the next 1/2 hour trying with two wheel drive tractors and even two at a time. My wife commented that our bus had become a tractor pull.
The guys then were excited to report they had it figured out. In front of a crowd of 200-300 people who had lined both sides of our bus for a long way, an early 1900 steam tractor smoked it’s way in front of our bus. Many believed the weight of this machine would do the job. Despite the confidence of many, my head was shaking as this failed as well. Finally, a local farmer with a huge caterpillar tractor with tracks pulled us to the stage. With a police escort, we had to drive right down the mid way after the show to stay on the pavement. Other than a muddy mess, we had no damage.
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Thanks for the kind words fellows!
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Glad you got out okay Jake… we got stuck in mud at a Cruisin Cajuns Rally in the Vantare It was Sunday morning after an unexpected rain overnight… we were really bogged down on the drives… our only option for getting out quickly was to use the Suburban to pull it out from the rear as there was solid ground a foot behind the drives so using some boards and the suburban and a steel cable… Larry at the wheel and me in the suburban managed to get out very slowly.. I was shocked that the suburban would handle that but it sure did… we buried those boards in the mud but all was well in the end. Would not want to do that again though…I was really nervous.
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